Townsville’s inaugural North Australian Festival of Arts (NAFA), the Northern Fringe Festival and HALO wrapped up this weekend after a massive 32 days of arts, culture and events.
Over 100,000 people gathered across locations such as The Strand, Queens Gardens and other venues to witness local, national and international performers.
Townsville Mayor Jenny Hill said the response to NAFA had been overwhelmingly positive.
“The North Australian Festival of Arts was an idea born and put together by Council and our staff and the feedback from the community has been incredible,” Cr Hill said.
“It was fantastic to visit some of our premier venues in Townsville and see so many happy faces attending the huge variety of shows on offer.
“It really shows that Townsville can host world-class events and get behind not just national and international acts, but also support the wonderful local talents we have right here in our city.”
Cr Hill said that the final weekend of HALO had also been a huge hit with residents and visitors packing into Queens Gardens.
“Tens of thousands of people gathered in the iconic Queens Gardens last weekend to get a glimpse of HALO before it finished on Sunday night.
“Council worked closely with AGB Events to create a show that would wow everyone in the city, and it exceeded all expectations.
“So much so that we’ve even had people requesting video footage all the way from London just so they can experience the magical light and sound show.”
NAFA will become an annual festival and dates for 2020 are expected to be finalised soon.
To provide feedback on your experience of NAFA, visit the .
Quirks and other information:
- Over 100,000 people attended a range of events and ticketed shows across NAFA – not including Strand Ephemera and HALO – numbers are still being finalised on these.
- Tens of thousands of people showed up for the final weekend of HALO.
- 21 sell-out shows in the Wonderland Spiegeltent with 23,000 people attending ticketed NAFA events.
- More than 300 events made up the NAFA program.
- Over 600 performers, artists, musicians, comedians, dancers and more were involved in the NAFA program with hundreds of others involved in Northern Fringe Festival Events.
- HALO was so well received and far-reaching that Council has had a request for footage from London for a traveller that couldn’t make it to Townsville to see it.
- A local couple made history by getting engaged in front of Castle Hill during a showing of HALO.
